Until Our Hearts Stop

Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods (US/DE/BE) & Münchner Kammerspiele (DE)

How close can people get to each other? Meg Stuart has been dealing with this question for more than two decades. Until Our Hearts Stop” is also dedicated to the search for closeness, the permanently impossible but momentarily pleasurable togetherness. Six performers form a temporary collective that has to cooperate in a challenging and playful way and follows an insane set of rules; that engages in yoga exercises or acrobatics, performs magic tricks and rituals, stages fights, and tests skin-to-skin contact beyond the usual shame. It is not so much the themes or the sequence of absurd, tender, aggressive or ecstatic scenes that put “Until Our Hearts Stop” together as an evening: Rather, the rhythm – the swelling and ebbing, the acceleration and the standstill – creates a common place of desire and illusion. It is initiated and amplified by the even more unleashed sound of the jazz trio Samuel Halscheidt (bass), Marc Lohr (drums) and Stefan Rusconi (piano/trumpet). “Until Our Hearts Stop” is a performative experimental arrangement in which the experience of physical boundaries can break down mental barriers: Naked, the skin separates two persons, but in play the two become an experimental, sensual organism.

Meg Stuart, born in New Orleans (USA), is a dancer and choreographer. In 2018 she was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for her life’s work and the German Dance Prize for outstanding performers. This was in recognition of her outstanding role in the development of contemporary dance. The Kulturstiftung des Bundes was able to win Meg Stuart as artistic director for the triennial dance congress, which will be held in Dresden in 2019. Meg Stuart lives and works in Berlin and Brussels.

“Until Our Hearts Stop chafes against the life that keeps on going until nothing but a breathing body and a beating heart remain.” (Charlotte De Somviele, De Standaard)

“Stuart breaks open her linguistic idiom to create lyrical dance theatre that unites performers and spectators in admiration and, yes, love. It makes Until Our Hearts Stop the ultimate, whirling expression that a burning world longs for: faith in imagination and in each other.” (Jurybericht “het TheaterFestival” 2016, Antwerpen)